Trading Human Rights: How Preferential Trade Agreements Influence Government Repression

Abstract

A growing number of preferential trade agreements ~PTAs! have come to play a significant role in governing state compliance with human rights+ When they supply hard standards that tie material benefits of integration to compliance with human rights principles, PTAs are more effective than softer human rights agreements ~HRAs! in changing repressive behaviors+ PTAs improve members' human rights through coercion, by supplying the instruments and resources to change actors' incentives to promote reforms that would not otherwise be implemented+ I develop three hypotheses: ~1! state commitment to HRAs and ~2! PTAs supplying soft human rights standards ~not tied to market benefits! do not systematically produce improvement in human rights behaviors, while ~3! state commitment to PTAs supplying hard human rights standards does often produce better practices+ I draw on several cases to illustrate the processes of influence and test the argument on the experience of 177 states during the period 1972 to 2002+ Human rights violations are pervasive+ 1 As a substantial percentage of states repress their citizens, an increasingly dense set of formal treaties, conventions, and protocols have been designed to protect the inalienable rights of human beingshuman rights agreements ~HRAs!+ These agreements are different than other forms of international cooperation designed to overcome collective action problems and to internalize cross-border externalities+ HRAs are designed to regulate sov-